Bella Street Romance Goes Retro

This week's author feature is Texan Missy Jane. Check out her latest book They Call Me Death . Because after dark, things go South fast...

Brian Rathbone is Southern Fried Gothic's featured author this week! Check out his book Call of the Herald, book one of The Dawning of Power trilogy. If you're a southern author or write books set in the south, we'd love to feature you on our blog . Because after dark, things go South fast!

" Lost in Austen is an ingenious reinvention of the classic novel, Pride and Prejudice, in which Jane Austen’s story is thrown off track by a very modern heroine, Amanda Price ( Jemima Rooper ). Amanda swaps places with Elizabeth Bennet ( Gemma Arterton ) and takes centre stage in the celebrated love story. Disillusioned with her life in London and disenchanted with her boyfriend, Amanda Price discovers Elizabeth Bennet in her bathroom. Soon she finds herself swapping places with Lizzie, and entering the ‘real’ fictional world of Pride and Prejudice . Amanda arrives at Longbourn, the home of the Bennet family, and realises she’s joined the action at the very start of the story, she gets to know the remaining Bennet sisters, and prepares to meet Mr Darcy ( Elliot Cowan ). How will she keep the greatest love story of all time on track when Elizabeth Bennet is stuck in the modern world? " I watched this show with absolute delight and it kept me guessing until th

Southern Fried Gothic blog is featuring Tony-Paul de Vissage and his latest book Dark God Descending . Check out an exerpt ! Because after dark, things go south fast.

...I say bring it on, Red Riding Hood! A new film by Catherine Hardwicke promises to deliver the same qualities to the fairy tale as she used to bring Twilight to life. I'm looking forward to meeting the big bad wolf! Another film mixing the old and the new also looks to be perking up cinematic prospects next year...

I've probably read this book more times than any other. And I'm always excited when there's yet another film adaptation. Can't wait!

Join me in a new series as I blog about Southern Gothic themes over at Southern Fried Gothic . I'll be discussing fiction, films, and music.

You think fairies are cute and fragile? Think again. Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr describes an unseen world of hauntingly beautiful horrors threatened by an eternal winter...unseen by all except to protagonist, Aislinn. She has the Sight and has endured a miserable life because of it. Things only get more complicated when she finally admits her feelings for a mortal while the Summer King plies for her hand with Summer Wine and the promise of passion and frivolity. The story pulls details from a wide variety of Celtic fairy lore and weaves together an intriguing story set in the present. What will Aislinn do when faced with an impossible choice?

Ford Madox Ford famously said, “Open the book to page ninety-nine, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” Now there's a website devoted to it . As a writer, you can upload published or unpublished page 99s of your work. Or as a reader you can go read the page 99s and vote/comment. You don't get to see who wrote it until after you vote. It's a lot of fun. Here's what I posted from my romance entitled Kiss Me, I'm Irish . “There's a park nearby,” Tinker said. “Let's go sit on a bench and chillax before going back to our stuffy motel room.” Liam glanced down at Emily and thought that might be a good idea. Emily kept her face averted as they walked the short distanced to a playground loaded with screaming kids. He noticed her occasionally wiping her eyes and felt his anger return. Was this just an act to make him feel like a monster? Damn, he needed a cigarette. Maybe nicotine would help him think straight if common sense didn't.

The first pages of Halo by Alexandra Adornetto are telling. There's a quote by Shakespeare, followed by one from Beyonce and throughout the book the reader is treated to the old and the new, the heavenly and the physical, the sacred and the worldly. I've been going through a spate of YA reads lately and Halo ended up on my radar, probably by an Amazon suggestion, and I enjoyed it to the last page. It's refreshing to see purity--not just sexual-- presented in a positive light in a book. While the premise of Halo wasn't all that original, the author ( an 18 year old! ) put a fresh spin on it that resonated with all the angst of teen love. And after the grim, dystopian world of Katniss Everdeen , I was ready for some Bethany Rose Church.

Check out my latest blog post at Southern Fried Gothic . The Wild Men of Borneo is a werewolf legend that's been promulgated right in my own back yard. Oww-ooooooo!

No broody, sparkly vamps are present (although one has a suspiciously red nose) in the new novel Draculas by Blake Crouch, Jack Kilborn, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson.  The plural form of the noun 'dracula' has particular meaning in the novel, as there are LOTS. They don't read minds, tell the future, or look good in American Apparel . These are vamps one wants to avoid-- desperately . Unless your DNA hearkens back to mists of antiquity when rulers were a leetle more brutal. The book brims with blood, guts, and an array of characters who fight for their lives, and the lives of the innocent. Non-stop action, fangs and balloon animals abound with a liberal dose of black humor. The book is also brimming with extras like short stories, deleted and alternate scenes, and novel excerpts by the authors' other works. To read the first 50 pages, go here . The read the whole thing,  head to Amazon on October 19th. And just because the book comes out in time for Ha

“ Honestly, you’re the angriest man I’ve ever known .” Raylan Givens is told this by his ex-wife. And it was at that point I knew this was a great show (with seriously kickin' music ). Justified is about a U.S. Marshal (played by Timothy Olyphant) who is being sent back to his hometown of Kentucky in reprimand for a shooting. He killed a bad guy, who pulled first. He was justified. But there's so much more to the soft-spoken lawman than being good at his job. There's an inner rage couched in the veneer of being on the right side of the law. It's no wonder he hooks up with a Southern Belle who killed her husband. She was justified, too.

  ...over at Southern Fried Gothic , entitled Paranormal Tennessee. The latest entry: the legend of The Bell Witch . Check it out!

Sometimes a song just hits home and sums of the theme of a current writing project. It's fun when that happens. The latest is Impossible by Anberlin . Sums up a relationship in my series in progress Apocalypse Babes .

Inception blew my head hole , and despite all the furor of what the ending entailed, I knew in my knower what was to be known . And Michael Caine agrees with me. So there. Spoilers ahead, natch.

  The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is the first in a trilogy , following by Catching Fire and Mockingjay . The blurb: " Could you survive on your own, in the wild, with everyone out to make sure you don't live to see the morning? In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by 12 outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18 to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before -and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that we